Jarrett House NorthSecond verse, same as the first.

This has been building for a bit. I had more work to do on it, then I thought it was done. Then I heard the last two songs side by side and realized they were the perfect coda. So it’s a little longer than CD length. Oh well… The Empty Page – Sonic Youth (Murray [...]

I wasn’t expecting to do another mix so soon after the last one (the business), but this one was kicking around for a while. As always, I was throwing songs I liked to listen to into a temporary playlist called “next,” but couldn’t figure out how to link them all together. Then one day I [...]

Did you ever notice how many songs there are about the music business itself? I think the popular music industry is possibly even more self-referential than the newspaper industry (though not nearly as self-referential as the Internet…). I started hearing the connection a few years ago and began collecting examples in a playlist, and I [...]

It’s been a while since I’ve done a new mix. This one, My heart’s beating is all the proof you need (Art of the Mix), has been interesting–a little more upbeat than some of my past efforts, a few songs that have been kicking around my library for many years. I think the subtheme of [...]

Well, here we are again, in the middle of a storm. So far, knock wood, it’s been a lot of rain and very little wind, but this will be the day that Massachusetts really gets it. So I threw together some music to weather the hurricane by. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall – Bob Dylan (The [...]

End of summer is happy mix time. Now that I’m putting out only two mixes a year, it seems like one is downbeat and the other is happy. Lots of fun tunes in here, including a rare Shannon Worrell track that I had to pull off a 17 year old cassette tape. Moonlight In Glory [...]

This mix has been percolating a while. I didn’t know how to move beyond Jeff Buckley’s absolutely epic reading of his lament for his dead father, but it turns out that anger works remarkably well when played against grief and loss. And that’s how the rest of the mix went. I make no apologies for [...]

We call this “unclogging the pipes.” I have probably 20 mixes in various partial states of repair, and it’s high time I start publishing them so that I can make room for the real stuff. So here are two—maybe, dare I hope, my last two—80s mixes. As always, the first one is the stuff I’m [...]

The aftermath of a big flood feels like the right time to publish my first mix in about six months. Happy time is one part of a two part mix. This time, I might not ever get around to part two, because it’s the downside of this mix, and I’m enjoying the happy side too [...]

My latest mix, “september grrls,” did not start out to be (almost) all women artists, but it ended up that way. After strong releases this year from Shannon Worrell, PJ Harvey, Neko Case, and others, plus Kim Gordon’s contributions to the latest Sonic Youth… well, I couldn’t resist. Add to that a few songs that [...]

Again, posting the tracklist here because Art of the Mix is gone. I will send this one out, just as soon as I get around to sending the last ones out (yes, I’m aware that I’m about three months behind on that). Here’s, depending on the numbering system, 4.23 or JHNCD0035: The Arcade Fire, “Neighborhood [...]

James Brown, “Funky President (People It’s Bad)” William S. Burroughs, “When Did I Stop Wanting to Be President” The Cure, “Primary (Morgan Studio Outtake 9/80)” Max Roach, “Freedom Now” Sam Cooke, “A Change Is Gonna Come” Virginia Glee Club, “I shall not die without a hope” (Testament of Freedom) Jay-Z and Danger Mouse, “Dirt Off [...]

As so often happens as I’m putting mixes together, I’ve collected enough tracks for about three mixes since I published “picture of you where it began” back in May (“Blasphemous Rumors” was a one-off theme mix that didn’t dip into this pool). So I ended up splitting out this first set of tracks as the [...]

I haven’t posted a new mix for a while, and there are a few reasons for that. So I’m jumpstarting by posting a largely unedited theme mix, based on Estaminet’s Sacrilicious mix of a while back. It’s called “Blasphemous Rumors,” and it hits songs with Old and New Testament themes as well as good old [...]

Inaugurating the new blog in style, here’s my latest mix, which started as a party and ended as a lullaby. Of course, the Art of the Mix service is down right now, but here’s a quick tracklist: Italian men, “Su Tenore A Ballu” (field recording) M.I.A., “Bamboo Banga” The Beatles, “She Said She Said” The [...]